Project Overview
The Problem: Voters are overwhelmed when making decisions in local elections
My Role: created and conducted user research survey, designed wireframes and prototype for a phone app that educated voters on their local issues.
Duration: 7 hours (hackathon)
Tools: Sketch, inVision
Deliverables: Survey, user interviews and insights, and clickable prototype.
Intro
I worked with a team of 2 other individuals during an open-ended Hackathon.
Brainstorming ideas:
We really wanted to do something with civic tech in mind – some problems that we wanted to solve were:
We settled on how to increase voter turnout, since the national elections are coming up. A lot of people are excited about voting for President in this election, but people also felt overwhelmed when voting for local issues and representatives. Even in San Francisco, where locals seem fairly engaged than in other cities, there were issues in local elections.
Only 45% of eligible voters turned out for the San Francisco Mayoral Elections in 2015. San Francisco is actually one of the cities where it's relatively easy to vote - we have same day registration and voters do not need to have a permanent address to vote.
Ed Lee's approval rating in San Francisco is about 43%!
Getting to Know Our Users
Our assumption was the no one really votes in local elections – as it turns out a lot of Bay Area voters are interested in local issues and elections – they’re very engaged, but feel that there’s a lot of things to look at out there.
Before we started we had to ask ourselves – what exactly is the users’ problem? Many people are interested in the current elections that are about to take place in November 2016, but a lot of people don’t know about the local aspect of the elections. Most of our survey respondents actually had voted. Those who didn’t vote said that they were too overwhelmed and busy to do so. However, most of our respondents agreed on wanting more information on the following:
Development
Part of the requirements for this hackathon was to create a product that is unique. Since we only had a limited time and wanted to address this aspect of the hackathon, we decided to focus on the last user problem – how the ballot measures would affect the users, personally. We realized that the best way to address this problem was to focus on an onboarding process that creates a voter profile. So as not to get caught in the weeds of one flow, we also created an overarching information architecture to see where the onboarding process would fit.
We quickly designed some sketches to go over an onboarding flow and make sure we were all on the same page. We had the basic idea of the flow, but had differing opinions as to exactly how much content would be on each page, particularly the profile page:
After testing, iterating, and testing our paper sketches, we created a clickthrough prototype:
Conclusion and Next Steps
We focused on San Francisco elections for this project, but the question remains – is this scaleable? Most other cities in the US do not have the same kind of ballot measures that California cities have. If we continue this project, we will have to do additional research on residents of other cities.
I would also like to test the prototype, especially the profile page to see if it has the information that voters need.